Hi Guys
Today my Mavic decided to call it a day and has been lost forever.
After a pretty routine flight on my first battery I took it down and fitted my second battery, after about 5 minutes in the air the video feed began to vibrate violently from side to side up and down, I have never seen this before, even with no input into the controller it continued to do it (at this point in time I was sitting around 100m height and 300 m in distance, after about 2 minutes later I hit the Return to Home button on the controller and the drone began to move towards me. After it reached the return to home point at around 50 m away from me I had it in sight and it seemed normal and stable i.e it didn't appear to wildly rotate in a way a lost a prop or motor would behave. At this point in time I assumed it was only a gimbal issue and not a critical fault, it began to descend as per the RTH program. I cancelled the RTH to bring it in closer to me however it appeared to not respond correctly to my controller inputs. It appeared to perform large circles while maintaining height. Suddenly from my line of sight it appeared to descend faster than usual while still doing the large loops. Visually it still appeared to be still pretty stable. At this point in time it had dropped below the tree line and the video feed shows it spiraling into the river albeit un-retrievable .
See below for the final moments (its heart breaking watching this over and over!)
Iv had my Mavic for just over 12 months, It had done 64 hours, 1507km (936mi), 277 flights. It had never seen a crash and had been treated like a commercial jet, with pre flight checks and inspection of props and motor temps every month. Before it decided to fly away it was in immaculate condition and looked brand new.
While I racked my brain on how this could occur I thought back to the countless threads I have read over the past 12 months about other people loosing there drones generally come to the conclusion that it was a preventable incidents i.e pilot error , use of non oem props, modifications etc. these where great reads but I’d thought would never happen to me.
After several hours of allowing it to sinking in id conceded that no amount of deliberation can bring the Mavic back although it had brought me countless hours of joy and a year of memories there is still a part of me being frustrated for not bringing it down sooner (where it could have been retrieved on dry land) and not knowing what the root cause was. However the Mavic is at the end of the day a piece of electronics just like phones ,tvs and computers we have around the house, they do have a finite life.
I’d hate to think this is a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) statistic – just ~60 hours – but it would be quiet interesting to know what the actual Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is for a Mavic and what the experience others have had (provided they have not had prior damage or been in crashes).
Nonetheless my mavic had flown an impressive distance and had been flawless up until now. It is now the time to move on.
Cheers all
Today my Mavic decided to call it a day and has been lost forever.
After a pretty routine flight on my first battery I took it down and fitted my second battery, after about 5 minutes in the air the video feed began to vibrate violently from side to side up and down, I have never seen this before, even with no input into the controller it continued to do it (at this point in time I was sitting around 100m height and 300 m in distance, after about 2 minutes later I hit the Return to Home button on the controller and the drone began to move towards me. After it reached the return to home point at around 50 m away from me I had it in sight and it seemed normal and stable i.e it didn't appear to wildly rotate in a way a lost a prop or motor would behave. At this point in time I assumed it was only a gimbal issue and not a critical fault, it began to descend as per the RTH program. I cancelled the RTH to bring it in closer to me however it appeared to not respond correctly to my controller inputs. It appeared to perform large circles while maintaining height. Suddenly from my line of sight it appeared to descend faster than usual while still doing the large loops. Visually it still appeared to be still pretty stable. At this point in time it had dropped below the tree line and the video feed shows it spiraling into the river albeit un-retrievable .
See below for the final moments (its heart breaking watching this over and over!)
Iv had my Mavic for just over 12 months, It had done 64 hours, 1507km (936mi), 277 flights. It had never seen a crash and had been treated like a commercial jet, with pre flight checks and inspection of props and motor temps every month. Before it decided to fly away it was in immaculate condition and looked brand new.
While I racked my brain on how this could occur I thought back to the countless threads I have read over the past 12 months about other people loosing there drones generally come to the conclusion that it was a preventable incidents i.e pilot error , use of non oem props, modifications etc. these where great reads but I’d thought would never happen to me.
After several hours of allowing it to sinking in id conceded that no amount of deliberation can bring the Mavic back although it had brought me countless hours of joy and a year of memories there is still a part of me being frustrated for not bringing it down sooner (where it could have been retrieved on dry land) and not knowing what the root cause was. However the Mavic is at the end of the day a piece of electronics just like phones ,tvs and computers we have around the house, they do have a finite life.
I’d hate to think this is a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) statistic – just ~60 hours – but it would be quiet interesting to know what the actual Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is for a Mavic and what the experience others have had (provided they have not had prior damage or been in crashes).
Nonetheless my mavic had flown an impressive distance and had been flawless up until now. It is now the time to move on.
Cheers all
